by Karen Karbo
“I debated. I put it in and took it out.” She noticed she said “I,” not we.
“No, you were right. Sometimes a scene deserves to live, irrespective of its place in the piece. There are, of course, two schools of thought. One says if a scene is too good it should be cut. I say good scenes, really memorable ones, are so rare they should be used. Someday I will do a compilation film of all my best scenes with only title cards in between saying what film they’re from.”
“Cool,” said E. Bomarito.
“If only Harris thought so. Harris is my distributor,” he said to Mouse.
“Well, nice seeing you,” said Mouse abruptly.
She stumbled out of the booth and back to her chair, where she perched for less than a minute before tripping to her feet, out of her seat, out of the room.
Mimi had seen Ivan’s face through the window in the booth. She had heard E. Bomarito call out, “You all right in there?” She saw Mouse return to her seat, then leave.
Outside, Mouse stood shivering on the lawn by the crèche, kicking at a tuft of grass with the toe of her tennis shoe, smoking a cigarette. Even though it was nearly Christmas, which meant it should have been about eighty-seven degrees, it was drizzling and cold. The air smelled gloomy and stale.
“Somewhere I read that clouds have the same PH as battery acid,” said Mimi, staring up at the dirty cotton sky.
“That’s impossible.”
“No, I read it in the New Yorker. It’s called acid fog.”
“Clouds do not have the same PH as battery acid.”
“Not all clouds. Only the clouds in L.A.”
“You said clouds.”
“The clouds in L.A., I meant.”
“Ivan’s here –” Mouse started.
“I know. Shirl called him. I think this whole thing, the operation and everything, has made her half a bubble off plumb. Isn’t that great? It’s construction worker lingo. I heard it from the guy at work putting in the new false ceiling.”
“I go to the bathroom and there he is. In the projection booth.”
“Was that him? He looks like everyone else with that dumb ponytail.”
Mouse swore one of Mimi’s great satisfactions in life was dismissing everything that she considered interesting or important as beneath talking about, much less thinking about. She couldn’t help remembering the afternoon of her discovery at the Academy Library. She had hurried back to the apartment to find Mimi doing yoga on the living room floor.
“Why didn’t you tell me Ivan was doing documentary! He’s won an Oscar, for Godsakes.”
“That was a jillion years ago.” Mimi exhaled deeply. “Sit on my ankles, would you?”
Now, although Mouse was bursting to say, “Thanks for telling me!” she was loath to give Mimi yet another juicy opportunity to shrug and drawl, “I meant to. Guess I forgot.” Instead she took a marking pen out of her purse and added the missing e to the AFRICAN MOVIS sign.
“Shirl got his number from the phone book,” Mimi continued. “I told her she could have called me. She told him you were back, you know, that you were having this little screening. He’s probably hanging out in the booth because it’d be too like weird and painful. Seeing me – us – and everything. He really went off the deep end after we split. Half a bubble off plumb. You never really knew him –”
‘’I knew him –”
“You knew him, you knew him, but you didn’t know him. He sold one of his kidneys to finance a movie.”
“He did not.”
“He did.”
“The woman most full of it,” said Ivan, appearing suddenly at the top of the basement stairs. He dug in the chest pocket of his T-shirt for a joint, which he lit nonchalantly.
“I can’t believe you still smoke,” said Mimi. “Mouse, can you believe he still smokes? How do you get anything done?”
Mouse just stared, jaw slack in disbelief, thick brows furrowed. It was hard to believe. The sisters FitzHenry and Ivan Esparza together again. He offered the roach to her. She shook her head.
“I’ll have some,” said Mimi before he replugged the roach between his lips, “How do you like Mouse’s movies? Aren’t they great? The New Stanley is my favorite, then Allah on the Rocks. They’re showing that next.”
“I’m afraid it’ll have to be another time. Got a sound mix.”
“When did you see Allah?” Mouse asked Mimi.
“A sound mix at this hour? Don’t tell me. You’ve broken into a sound studio and are holding the guard hostage.”
“When did you see Allah on the Rocks?”
“I haven’t. I mean, I saw some clips. Tony showed me. Ivan, did you meet Tony? Tony is Mouse’s fiancé. He’s tall and English, like somebody out of The Avengers.”
“He is not like somebody out of The Avengers,” Mouse said hotly.
She looked down at her toes, embarrassed. “He’s not my fiancé –”
“He is too –”
“Yes, yes, he’s my, my – I’m getting married, but I don’t think of him like that. I mean, we’re partners. We make, we used to make films together. We made those films together.” She waved her hand almost dismissively in the direction of the basement.
“When are you getting married?” Ivan asked. He batted the smoke away from his broad inscrutable face. “I am very interested in weddings,” he said.
“You and every single woman in this city between fifteen and eighty,” said Mimi. “Except me. Once was enough for me.”
Ivan ignored the remark, choosing instead to ask Mouse where she was living and if he could have her phone number.
He reached over, ground out the roach on a cheek of one of the plaster wise men, then replaced it in his pocket.
12.
“SIX MONTHS LATER, SILVERMAN WAS IN CHARGE OF business affairs; three years later he found himself running the studio.” Ralph read aloud from an article he’d clipped from the newspaper.
“He found himself running the studio? Gimme a break. They talk like the guy’s a sleepwalker just woke up. I want to know, those three years, what happened. That’s what every successful schmuck keeps a secret. They bore you till your teeth rot about their coke problem, but try to get them to talk about those three years. What, was he just sitting in business affairs jacking off, then one day the memo comes saying ‘congratulations, you’re now one of the most powerful people in Hollywood’?”
Wednesday night, How to Write a Blockbuster. Ralph and Mimi walked through Valley College to class. Ralph waved the article in front of his face like an irate anarchist.
In anticipation of Christmas vacation, which began next week, most of the night classes had been canceled. The halls echoed in semidesertion. As they passed a row of snack machines, Mimi glanced over to make sure they had her favorite oatmeal cookies.
“Guess how old he is?” said Ralph.
“Forty,” said Mimi. She wasn’t really listening. She wanted to tell him she hadn’t had a chance to do her homework, in order to avoid the humiliation of confessing it in front of the whole class.
“Forty,” he scoffed.
“Twelve.”
“C’mon, c’mon.”
“I don’t know. Younger than us.”
“Twenty-nine. Twenty-fucking-nine. I want some statistics, I want a graph. I want to see exactly how much your chances of making it decrease as your age increases. How old do I look to you?” He tipped his baseball cap off his head, smoothed his thin, dust-colored hair, ran a finger over each fair eyebrow.
“Twenty-nine, sweet cheeks.” Mimi slid her hand in the back pocket of his jeans.
“Really? I really look twenty-nine?”
She wanted to say, You look three days old. “At the most.”
Sometimes she felt as though being with Ralph she had all the disadvantages of wifehood but none of the advantages. Not that she really wanted to break up with him. Despite his ravings, he was better than nothing. She just wished he’d get a divorce. Not that she wanted to marry him. Anyway
, she knew the divorce issue was a financial one. Although, when she was feeling insecure and bad about herself, she wondered. Last week, for example, she called his almost ex-wife, Elaine the Pain, to tell her that Bibliothèques had been rescheduled, and Ralph answered the phone. He said he was fixing her oven. As far as Mimi knew, Ralph was about as handy around the house as a debutante. Not that he shouldn’t still be friendly with Elaine. They had been married ten years, after all. She sometimes wished she could be friends with Ivan, if only to make Ralph as jealous as Elaine made her.
“Ralph, I didn’t get a chance to do my dust-jacket copy. You know, with the screening and, it’s not easy to work with house guests around. I wish they’d get their own place. Maybe if your thing with V.J. happens.”
In fact, Mimi liked having Mouse and Tony around the apartment. She didn’t mind the strange hairs curling around the shower drain, clean glasses put away in the wrong cupboard, crumbs on the coffee table from someone eating toast in front of the tube. It was nice at night: the TV on but no one watching. Somewhere in a back room, the tinny noise of a radio left on. Shoes left, toe to heel, under the dining room table. People dropped by, an unheard-of thing before Mouse and Tony arrived. Lisa stopped in one day on her way home from work. Carole was at the kitchen table writing a screenplay synopsis on her portable typewriter. They smoked some ancient pot Mimi found in a baggie in the junk drawer and passed around one of those jillion-ounce plastic bottles of Pepsi, their knees propped against the edge of the table.
The kitchen sink was clogged. They watched and laughed while Tony, who looked to be above such things, attacked it with the Drano, reading instructions aloud in his Masterpiece Theater voice. Mimi made everyone grilled cheese sandwiches, then, still hungry, they sent out for a pizza. They talked for a long time about the greenhouse effect instead of the film business. It was the pot. It made them nostalgic for being aware of something beside their own nonexistent film careers, their nonexistent marriages and children.
“No one’ll drop the Bomb,” said Lisa. “Even the Arabs are too smart for that. It’s pollution.”
“The world will die of thirst, there’ll be no water to drink, there’ll be no air to breathe,” said Carole.
“– our brains will he crushed under the weight of worldwide cultural mediocrity,” said Tony. “If water boils out of drain, immediately add another cup of COLD water.”
Mimi’s attitude was, if you can’t have a family, you might as well have it like college.
How to Write a Blockbuster was in its fifth week. There were eleven students, evenly divided between the young and entrepreneurial and the old and entrepreneurial. Most of them were there because they believed there was more money to be made in writing a blockbuster and selling it to television than in writing an original screenplay. One eighteen-year-old prodigy of modern life was taking the class because it was cheaper than buying screenplay software. Mimi was there because she believed in self-improvement; also, she wanted to write a blockbuster so she could quit her job at Talent and Artists and take acting classes. After she’d brushed up on the Method and perhaps had some of her facial lines removed, she would get back in touch with Bob Hope.
Mimi thought she was the only one with real writing potential in the bunch, as evidenced by the fact she was so slow. Her opposite, Peg, a Brillo Pad-permed ex-nun and self-described workshop junky, turned in reams of pages each week, all featuring legions of throbbing members and twitching nipples. They had not officially started writing yet, but Peg was already on page three hundred. Ralph used to save Peg’s pages to read to Mimi in bed, providing them with many a postcoital hoot. He said that Peg was also Mimi’s opposite in that Peg wrote about torrid sex but never had any, and Mimi had torrid sex but never wrote about it. Torrid, Mimi thought, is in the eye of the beholder.
They met in a room that had no desks, only bright-orange plastic chairs and merciless bars of cold fluorescent light. The class before How to Write a Blockbuster was an introductory course in convenience-store management for Asians. Various exhortations were always left on the blackboard. Correct change is a must! Arrange your shelves so ladies supplies are easy to find!
Before class, with a careless swipe of a chalky eraser, Ralph would replace these exhortations with his own: Writing a blockbuster is not about writing, it is about panning for gold! or What is your book about? Your book is about a car payment! The class that met there the next morning probably read these and found How to Write a Blockbuster as pitiful as Mimi and her classmates found Introduction to Convenience-Store Management. The thought of this was too depressing. Instead, Mimi pondered the oatmeal cookie she would eat at the break.
Tonight Ralph wanted to discuss how to effectively reduce your book to a blurb in TV Guide. Remember, he said, if you can’t do it, how was some TV Guide lackey who probably never read the press kit which was put together by someone who never saw the movie which was produced by people who never read the book supposed to do it?
“Before we get rolling, any questions?” He bounced back and forth across the front of the room, tossing a stub of chalk in the air, cocky in his turquoise St. Bart’s T-shirt, black jeans, and trademark Dodgers cap, every inch a man of confidence and success. The guy who’s got “things happening” all over Town, who’s feted by this producer, that director, so many agents he’s lost count, who teaches for the fun of it!
Only Mimi knew the truth. How to Write a Blockbuster was a car payment.
Peg was curious about jacket photos. A mortician from Tarzana wondered what kind of hotels they put you up in on your publicity tour. Ralph chastised them. He said he didn’t like these questions. They were putting the cart before the horse, when what they needed to concentrate on was how they would create a lively and enticing blurb. Ralph also didn’t like these questions because he didn’t know the answers.
At the break, Mimi bolted for the snack machine before anyone else had time to leave their seat. She gobbled down the Frisbee-sized cookie, which tasted vaguely like a disk of solidified sawdust, then rooted around the bottom of her purse for loose change for some M&Ms. On her way to her favorite restroom in the next complex of buildings, she expressed them straight from the bag into her throat, bypassing her taste buds.
As long as she got rid of it all before she went home, she never gained a pound. That was the important thing. She knew she did this for a reason but could never figure out what it was. She read articles about eating disorders, but they only confused her. She was high-strung, also a little depressed. That was the most she could say. In the meantime, while she tried to figure it out, she didn’t want to get fat. Getting fat would only make it worse.
Chocolate and doughy things slid back up easily, so no one could ever tell, no broken blood vessels around her eyes, no croaky voice from a raw throat. She got rid only of bad food. She could keep down cucumber slices and yogurt with the best of them. It was just a thing she did to make herself feel better. She considered it sort of a hobby, like Shirl’s découpage. The whole process, from eating bad food to losing it, cured her anxious moods. It gave her a sense of mission. Drive-meet-eat-purge.
After she disposed of the cookie and M&Ms, eyes smarting, stomach burning, she slapped on some Extra Fuchsia lipstick, then blotted her eyes. She rinsed out her mouth and ate a mint, then reapplied some more lipstick. Sometimes Ralph liked to follow her to this far outpost for a quickie. Mimi thought he was probably living out some high school fantasy.
He waited for her outside, glancing through the homework. He rolled it into a tube and thrust it in his back pocket. “Why do you always use this restroom?” He sidled up close, unbuttoning her shirt.
“I like the privacy, sweet cheeks.”
“Me, too. Sweet boobs.” He kissed her neck, sneakily tugged down one of the cups of her bra. Both cups were stretched out as a result of this weekly ritual. Mimi made a point of wearing the same bra to class so he didn’t ruin every last one she owned. He had no idea how much a decent bra cost.
Mimi supposed she liked this rather dangerous behavior. She doubted Mouse did this. Although, as Ralph bombed her neck with wet, explosive kisses, she felt as though he wasn’t caressing her breast so much as twirling a combination lock, an anxious safecracker in training.
She sighed. She should have finished her dust-jacket copy.
IVAN CALLED MOUSE on Saturday, just after two. It was clear, bright, and hot. One of those days when the girls were growing up and Shirl made them feel guilty for staying inside. One of those days you could see the ocean from the mountains, and vice versa.
Downstairs Mimi’s Armenian neighbor sang “Jingle Bell Rock” along with the radio while sweeping her tiny terrace. Mouse watched a tape E. Bomarito had lent her, a documentary he’d worked on that had won a number of awards. Sniffy Voyeur lay by the Christmas tree watching her with his Egyptian eyes, beating his tail, big as a plume of pampas grass, on the wood floor, crooning for someone to come over and pet him. Mouse lay on the uncomfortable green wicker settee taking desultory bites out of a mushy red apple: a textbook case of post-premiere depression.
She had been anxious to get a screening, anxious to get It out there. You get a decent screening, it means you’re real. It means all those years away were good for something. It means you’re not just a girl who dabbles, not just a girl getting married. So now she had gotten It out there. She had gotten It out there and It stunk! She didn’t need a review to tell her – not that her screening had been reviewed. She arrived at this conclusion on her own.
She thought of the time and money and effort sunk into The New Stanley. Had anyone ever seen such a string of visual clichés? Had anyone ever seen such camera work, newscast banal interspersed with the most obvious arty shit? Had anyone ever heard such a murky sound track? It was too long, but at the same time underdeveloped, just one more “sensitive” film about an interesting weirdo. No better than the second-rate tape she was watching now, about the blind proprietor of a tattoo parlor in East Los Angeles.